Allocations (Preview)
Allocations are named budgets — denominated in U.S. dollars or in a custom unit such as core-hours, GPU-hours, or a pool of service credits — that let organization admins track and cap usage independently of groups. Custom units are the typical use case: awarded HPC compute, grant-funded resources, and other non-dollar accounting that the Cost Dashboard alone cannot represent. You can share an allocation with one or more groups, nest it under a parent allocation, and feed it usage from the platform or from external sources like HPC clusters.
Feature Preview
Allocations is currently in Feature Preview. To use it, enable both of the following features for your own account:
allocations— exposes the Allocations UI and APIs.cost— enables the updated cost dashboard that allocation usage feeds into.
Click your username, select Feature Preview, then click Enable next to each feature. See Feature Preview for the full walkthrough. Until both are enabled on your account, the Allocations page will not appear in your sidebar.
Concepts
Allocations
An allocation is a named budget owned by your organization. Each allocation tracks three values:
- Total — the budgeted amount.
- Used — confirmed spend recorded against the allocation.
- Estimated used — pending or in-flight spend that has not yet been finalized.
Allocations can optionally be nested one level under a parent allocation, which is useful when you want to carve a department-level budget into project-level sub-budgets.
Units
A unit is the dimension an allocation is measured in. By default, allocations are denominated in U.S. dollars. Organizations can also define custom units — for example, core-hours or gpu-hours — and attach time-varying rate rules so that pricing can change over time without rewriting historical usage.
SKUs
A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is a billable resource type attached to a custom unit. When you set up a custom unit, you define the SKUs that describe what it charges for — for example, SLURM_NODE_HOUR for a per-node-hour HPC rate, or distinct codes for individual license tiers. Each usage event references a SKU code so the platform can rate it correctly against the unit's rules.
Usage events
A usage event is a record of consumption against an allocation. Each event carries a quantity, a start/end time, and a SKU code. The platform rates the event using the SKU's unit rules and rolls the result into the allocation's Used and Estimated used totals. Usage events can be deleted if a charge needs to be reversed.
Creating an allocation
From the Organizations list, select your organization. In the sidebar, under Billing, click Allocations, then click New Allocation.
Name
A unique name for the allocation within your organization. This name is shown in the dashboard and is used by integrations that record usage against the allocation.
Total
The budgeted amount, expressed in the allocation's unit.
Unit
The billing dimension. Leave this set to USD for a dollar-denominated budget, or select a custom unit your organization has defined.
Parent allocation
Optional. Select an existing allocation to nest this one beneath. Child allocations consume from the parent's pool. Only one level of nesting is supported.
Click Save when you're done.
Sharing an allocation
By default, only organization admins can see or use a new allocation. To let other users record or consume against it, find the allocation in the table and click the permissions icon in the Actions column to open its permissions panel.
You can grant three permission levels, either to specific groups or organization-wide:
- Read — view the allocation and its usage.
- Use — call the usage-event API to record consumption against the allocation.
- Admin — edit the allocation's total and manage its permissions.
Recording usage
API only
In this preview, usage events can only be recorded through the platform's REST API — there is no in-platform UI for adding usage, and launching a cluster does not yet automatically bill to an allocation. To populate an allocation, call the usage-event endpoint directly or run an integration that does so on your behalf.
The endpoint accepts a quantity, a start and end time, and a SKU code. The platform rates the event using the SKU's unit rules and updates the allocation's totals.
Viewing usage
The allocations table shows each allocation's Total, Used, Estimated, Remaining, and % Used at a glance. To drill into the individual usage events recorded against an allocation, click the usage ($) icon in the Actions column. As with the Cost Dashboard:
- Used reflects confirmed, finalized spend (for cloud usage, this is the true-cost data imported from your cloud service provider, which may lag by 24-48 hours).
- Estimated used reflects real-time, in-flight consumption that has not yet been confirmed.
The sum of the two gives you a near real-time view of how much of the allocation remains available.
Editing and deleting
To change an allocation's total, click the edit icon in the Actions column and update the Total field. Other fields (name, unit, parent) are fixed at creation time.
To delete an allocation, click the trash icon in the Actions column. Deletion removes the allocation along with all of its recorded usage events, so make sure you have exported any data you need first.
Tracking Slurm usage
If your organization runs Slurm-managed HPC clusters, the slurm-tracker CLI can post usage from those clusters directly into the allocations system. It runs on a Slurm login or controller node (typically as a cron job every few minutes), maps each Slurm account to an allocation and each Slurm partition to a SKU, and records core-hour consumption as usage events.
See the slurm-tracker README for installation, configuration, and the account-to-allocation mapping format.